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June 16, 2008
AIR 1.1 and Apprise 1.5
Note: Apprise is now available at apprisereader.com.
With the release of AIR 1.1 comes a new version of Apprise, a feed aggregator written for AIR. Apprise is a work in progress with lots of additional features to come, but here's what we have so far:
- Support for all versions of RSS and Atom.
- Automatic categorization by author and topic.
- OPML import and export.
- Realtime search.
- "Site view" (easily switch between the summary, and the site itself).
- Check marks. Put a check mark next to posts that you want to keep track of and easily find again later.
- Advanced sorting. Sort feeds, authors, and topics by name, or by number of unread posts.
Apprise 1.5 adds the following features:
- Support for 11 languages. Apprise now supports German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. By "support" I mean the UI is localized into these 11 languages — the aggregator itself will support any written language.
- Automatic feed resolution. Rather than entering a feed URL, you can now enter a site URL, and Apprise will automatically find and aggregate the feed associated with it.
- Improved search. The search algorithm in Apprise 1.5 is much more advanced. Both the title and the summary are searched, and you can search for multiple terms in any order.
- Improved "new post" heuristics. Apprise 1.5 is more intelligent about figuring out which posts are new in order to eliminate duplicates.
- General polish. We added several little improvements like focusing the cursor where appropriate, and updating individual feeds' unread count during the aggregation process rather than updating them all at the end.
If you check the code out and build Apprise yourself, you can get even more features:
- Copy support. You can copy post URLs to our clipboard for easy sharing.
- Drag and drop. Drag posts into an IM or email window to share stories.
- Vi keys. Well, J and K, anyway.
My new intern, Daniel Koestler, and I will be working on adding new features to Apprise this summer. And, of course, it's all cross-platform and open source, so anyone who wants to contribute features can.
The next version of Apprise (2.0) will enable the auto-update feature so you'll be able to pick up new features automatically. We consider 1.0 and 1.5 to be betas, so they have to be manually installed. Click on the badge below to have a look at what we have so far, and let us know in the comments what features you want to see next.
Posted by cantrell at 8:38 AM. Link | Comments (2) | References